Even If i Walk Alone

Instructing and encouraging you to live your life as a disciple of Jesus

priorities

Uncomfortable Truths

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We all encounter uncomfortable truths in our life. Some we can do little about on our own. Others are personal and we bear the full responsibility for them. As followers of Jesus, one of those uncomfortable truths is we’re not as much like Jesus as we’d like to be because we don’t want to be.

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We choose whether we will follow God’s ways or our own. It’s easier for us to blame the devil or the culture for the way we live. But the uncomfortable truth is we are as close to God as we want to be. Our lives look like that of Jesus only as much as we choose to align ourselves with Him.

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Personal Holiness

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God calls each of us to live a life of personal holiness. This goes much deeper than having a daily prayer time or attending a service on the weekend. Personal holiness is more than what we do. It’s also about what we don’t do. It’s what we choose to think about, and what we refuse to dwell on. Personal holiness will affect the words we say and those we don’t speak.

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It’s all-consuming. When we allow the holiness of God to permeate our entire being, everything changes. Everything looks different. We cannot afford to let even the smallest hint of sin take up residence in our hearts because it will eventually infect our entire body.

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Not by Bread Alone

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An oft-quoted but seldom lived verse in the Bible is Matthew 4:4. The scene was Satan tempting Jesus in the wilderness. Knowing Jesus was hungry after forty days of fasting, the devil encouraged the Son of God to turn the scattered stones into bread. As the Creator of all things, this would not have been a difficult task for Jesus. A little later in His life, we will see Him making five loaves of bread multiply into enough to feed over 5,000 people.

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So, certainly, the task of creating bread was not beyond Him. Jesus’s reply to Satan was one we all know well. He said, “Man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God”. The answer stopped the devil in his tracks. Truth has a way of doing that. Jesus knew what we all must learn: we find life in the Word of God, not in anything else.

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The Truth about Self-Gratification

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In a recent sermon, David Platt asked, “Will we live for self-gratification or God-glorification?” Those are our only two options. We will live for God or we will live for ourselves. Living for ourselves is a more palatable way of saying we will live to glorify Satan. That sounds harsh and shocking. We don’t want to think in those terms, which is why we mask it with words like selfishness and self-gratification.

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But know this, there are only two powers in the spiritual realm: God and Satan. Jesus spoke plainly when He said we cannot serve two masters (Matthew 6:24). We will love the one and hate the other. Every time we say no to Jesus, we say yes to the devil. This is the uncomfortable truth that applies to every decision we make, word we speak, or action we take.

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Other gods

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Psalm 16:4 contains a sober warning for us all. It says, “The sorrows of those who take another god for themselves will multiply”. The gods of this world fill our minds and our hearts, diverting attention away from Christ and onto our desires. We invest far too much of our time and resources in things that do not glorify Jesus. These other gods inhabit our entertainment choices, our priorities, and our thoughts.

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Jesus demands all of us, and we profess to have given it to Him. Reality dictates otherwise, and according to the Psalmist, we multiply our sorrows. If you wonder why you don’t seem to find the abundant life Jesus promised, perhaps it’s because too many idols are filling your life. It’s not something any of us want to admit, but is true in almost all our lives.

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